Film

The phrase Southern plantation immediately evokes images of antebellum ugliness that many would prefer to sweep under the collective-memory rug. For Godfrey Cheshire, a native of North Carolina, those words bring up even more conflicted feelings; his family actually owns a plantation named Midway that, surprisingly, is still standing. But a shopping center is now set to be built on the property, which means the house will have to be razed. No one can bear to see the place torn down, so the family does what anybody in the same situation would: hire a team of movers to place the centuries-old estate on a truck and cart the whole thing several miles down the road.

Rather than go the Herzog route and make a documentary about the extreme process of transporting a domicile, the film-critic-turned-director instead opts for a meditation on what some have called “the Southern thing.” Cheshire’s intelligent reflections on Midway’s legacy and his honest conversations with a long-lost African-American cousin make for some fascinating sociological voyeurism. But as with a lot of first-person docs, a certain amount of indulgence soon creeps in; for a movie about the concept of home, Moving Midway has a nagging tendency of resembling little more than a home movie.